FoloEngine is a complete commerce system that lives inside your own website. Catalog, cart, checkout, payments, customer accounts, loyalty, gift cards and a multi-vendor marketplace, all running on your own database as a Laravel package. The same engine now ships booking for stays, a full classifieds marketplace, and a mobile app API. A central control plane handles your license, your features and your site health from a distance, and never touches your data.
Every platform wants to hold your products, your orders, your customers. Then they charge you rent to read your own data over an API, and your shop goes dark the day their API does.
FoloEngine inverts that. The commerce engine installs into your Laravel app and writes to your database. The central engine keeps only what governance needs: your license, your capability grants, your site health. Counts and signals travel the wire. Rows never do.
You connect once. The engine activates your license, hands back a signed capability matrix, and steps out of the hot path. Every product page after that is a query against your own database. No API hop between a shopper and a sale.
# Once, at install time. $ composer require folowise/commerce $ php artisan commerce:install $ php artisan commerce:connect CONNECTED · license active # Capabilities cached · signed · TTL 300s // From then on, commerce is local code: $products = $catalog->listActive(perPage: 12); // → your database. No HTTP. No engine.
{ "license": "active", "capabilities": { "catalog.read": true, // core "cart": true, // core "checkout": true, // core "bundles": true, // granted "loyalty.points": false // not granted }, "signature": "hmac-sha256:9f2c…" }
The same package, the same license, the same signed control plane now powers three different kinds of business. Pick one per site, or combine them. Every one of them runs in your database, under your design.
Catalog, variants, cart, checkout, orders, reviews, loyalty, gift cards, promo codes, bundles and a multi-vendor marketplace. The full retail toolkit, running locally.
Properties, live availability calendars, binding nightly quotes and a reservation ledger that links every booking to a real order. Multi-host marketplaces included.
Members post ads, moderation queues keep it clean, faceted search keeps it findable. Paid promotion tiers, verified badges and dealer storefronts turn it into a business.
Plus a mobile app API: token auth, catalog, cart, checkout, orders and loyalty over HTTP, ready for a native iOS or Android app on any of the three.
Three live diagrams of the actual architecture. Each one shows a promise the engine keeps by construction, not by policy.
The commerce package installs into your Laravel app and publishes its tables into your database. Products, orders, customers and reviews live on your server, behind your boundary. The engine stands outside that line and cannot cross it.
We mint a license key and show it once. Your site activates it, receives a signing secret, and from then on every message between you and the engine is HMAC-signed with a burned nonce. The capability matrix comes back signed and cached. Tampered caches fail closed.
Every 15 minutes your site sends a signed heartbeat: counts, versions, health metrics. The engine computes a health state, raises maintenance notices, and lights a dashboard. If your site goes quiet, our screen shows offline and we investigate, while your data sits untouched in your own database.
These shaped the engine. We will not bend them, water them down, or sell an exception. If they do not sound right to you, we are probably not the right fit. That is fine.
Products, orders, customers sit in your database on your server. Not in our cloud, not in a shared tenant table, not behind our API. If you ever walk away from Folowise, there is no export to beg for. Your data is already with you.
The engine sees counts. Twelve products, forty orders, three pending reviews. It cannot see a single row, and we wrote the contract so it never can without a new signed architecture decision.
Catalog, cart, checkout and orders run inside the package, and their permission checks answer from a signed local cache. Serving a page never depends on a live call to us, so a brief engine outage is invisible to your customers; it shows on our dashboard, not in your checkout.
If a site stays cut off longer than its cache allows, the storefront pauses politely and the admin sees an honest banner instead of a mystery. Nothing is deleted, and the shop resumes by itself when the connection returns. We built the failure modes first and the features second.
Your license key is shown once and stored hashed. Every message between your site and the engine is signed with HMAC-SHA256 over a canonical manifest, carries a timestamp, and burns its nonce on first use. A replayed request dies at the door.
Even the local capability cache is signed. Tamper with it and the gate fails closed. We treat our own channel with the same suspicion we would treat a stranger's.
Not marketing lines. Each one of these is a structural decision in the engine, and each one is something the platforms cannot say back.
On Shopify and every SaaS platform, your products, orders and customers live in their cloud and you rent access. With FoloEngine they sit in your database on your server from day one. Leaving us requires no export, because there is nothing to export.
Platforms take a percentage of each transaction, so your costs grow exactly when you succeed. FoloEngine is one flat license per site. Sell ten times more, pay the same.
Headless platforms put an HTTP hop in front of every page. FoloEngine renders from your own database, so pages are fast on cheap hosting and your shop does not blink when someone else's API does.
Permission checks answer from a signed local cache with a grace window. If our engine goes down, your checkout keeps selling and the outage shows on our dashboard, not in your revenue.
Bilingual storefronts, full right-to-left, JOD pricing, COD, CliQ and bank transfer with manual reconciliation, and loyalty points that credit on delivery because that is how this region actually buys. Global platforms bolt this on. We started here.
A retail store, a booking operation and a classifieds marketplace share the same package, the same signed channel and the same control plane. Nobody else ships that in one box, SaaS or open source.
Nothing exotic. Nothing you cannot replace at 2 a.m. The engine is a stack of well-worn primitives wired with care.
We mint a license, you run two artisan commands, and commerce is live inside your own app the same day. No demo decks. No sales call.